Fundamendalist SDLCs
“[T]he rise of fundamentalism within any tradition is always a symptom of the unwillingness to try to sustain joint performances across disparate codes—or, to put it differently, to live in ambiguity, a life that requires constant learning.”
Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions
Fundamentalism is by no means limited to religion and politics. It’s one way that humans respond to the world around them, especially when in groups, especially when there’s a perception of threat. You bet your ass it shows up at work.
If, perchance, you’ve never done so (or even if it’s just been a while), have a gander at the original agile manifesto. You’ll find no mention of tools, no prescriptions, no proscriptions. It’s a document by dreamers, hoping to make progress in the world, not by eliminating nuance, but by leaving plenty of room to dance with it.
Twenty and change years later, what we as an industry typically call Agile is the Jira process. It’s very well-defined, and if you don’t subscribe to one of its denominations, you’re at the very least rebellious and more likely chastised or rejected by many of your industry peers.
We’ve largely lost the willingness to explore how different ways of working can fit different groups in different ways, and, further, to have more than one way of working in the same organization. And perish the thought of experimenting with entirely new approaches. That’s to be left to the professionals, whoever they might be–in any case, it’s not the business we’re in, because we have to deliver!
By having One True Way that all the teams in your industry work, you can have a shared vocabulary that makes reporting straightforward, comparing outputs simplistic, and individual workers more interchangeable.
So now, people are working under a system that may fit them poorly, and without anything to compare it to (except greybeards whispers of the damnable Waterfall), it’s impossible to figure out how to do better.
This is the cost of what Enterprise Agile has become: a fundamentalist SDLC.
